What’s New in vCloud Director 9.1

vCloud Director version 9.1 has been released. It has been just 6 months since the previous release (9.0) so VMware is delivering on its promise of multiple yearly releases in 6 months cadence.

In this whitepaper you can find high level overview of some of the new features. Let me summarize them and also provide additional ones here below.

H5 UI Enhancements

In iterative process the HTML 5 UI is slowly replacing legacy Flex UI. The tenant portion now includes vApp, Catalog and Networking management functionality, OVF/ISO download/uploads without the need for Client Integration Plugin (hooray!) and support for standalone VMware Remote Console.

Associated organizations from multiple or single (new in 9.1) vCloud Director instances now have aggregated view of all Org VDCs with seamless UI redirections between instances.

SDK for UI Extensibility has been released which means the service provider can extend the UI with additional sections to provide access to new services. The SDK includes very simple example of a static page extension (e.g. terms of service, links to other services or price lists) and upcoming vCAT-SP whitepaper will show how to do more complex ones.

The H5 UI is now also used in provider context but only for new features related to vRealize Orchestrator extensibility configuration.

Both legacy UIs (provider and tenants) are still available until the full feature parity is achieved.

vRealize Orchestrator Integration

Updated vRealize Orchestrator plugin has been released. This means both providers and tenants can automate and orchestrate repeating tasks in vCloud Director.

What is completely new is the ability to integrate any vRealize Orchestrator workflows into vCloud Director UI and essential provide XaaS (anything as a service). Similar to vRealize Automation XaaS.

External Tools

Not specifically tied with vCloud Director 9.1 but fully supported now are:

vcd-cli Linux command line tool to easily trigger or script common vCloud Director tasks (both for provider and tenant).

Container Service Extension Ability to extend vCloud Director to be target for deployment of Kubernetes clusters for tenants and simple management through CLI.

Did open a SR, had to put the certs chain in the Public URL in the API section, now its fixed!

About the VMRC do you know if you can connect remote devices, like usb, floppies (yeah I know dont ask, its for loading drivers the old fastion way) and ISO’s from catalog or local drive? I see the option grayed out.

You have to allow cells to access to your public vCloud Director url. So you will have to probably configure your load balancer firewall to allow it.
From each cell, test curl -k -v https://your-vcd-url/api/versions to check it.

Hello,
we’re getting two different problems w/ vCloud 9.1:
1) Provider/tenant portal shows empty blank page after the login (URL: https://fqdn/tenant/org or https://fqdn/provider).
2) We have two cells with four private ip.
Now, I have natted the two cells primary IP to two different public ip … and pasted the public certificate (root ca + intermediate + wildcard domain certificate in this order) in the VCD administrative section, public ip, but it continues to show the old certificates of the private part. It therefore seems to ignore what I paste into the three sections. What’s wrong? I Would prefer use private management IP for VCD and public IP for tenants.
Thank you.